The UCI has announced the World Tour Calendar for 2017 with 10 new events promoted and a total of 30 days of racing added. The new events help plug holes in the calendar but risk diluting the prestige of the prime calendar and while the new races join the calendar a mooted rule change means the newly promoted events could still have a secondary status.
Lizzie Armitstead has won an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport over three missed out-of-competition anti-doping tests that could have seen her banned for four years. Athletes regularly miss tests, these things happen but the hushed nature of her provisional suspension and the way her absence from races was reported by some as a choice raises a lot of questions.
Are you sitting comfortably? If so this could be a problem. Perhaps you’re reading this at home or at work, maybe on a train or while waiting in an airport? Chances are you’d prefer to be out on your bike and better still imagine if you had nothing else to do today but pedal hard across France and Switzerland during the height of summer.
That’s what hundreds of riders are doing in The Transcontinental race at the moment. This isn’t a pro race on the UCI calendar, in fact it’s almost the opposite and this is what makes it fascinating.
The high point of the Clásica San Sebastián, the Jaizkibel is a mountain at the very end of the Pyrenees and the start of the Basque Country, a hot bed of pro cycling that has produced many champions, teams and sponsors.
The 2016 Tour de France had plenty of highlights but the yellow jersey contest was not a vintage edition. It’s brought calls for all sorts of changes, from the Tour’s route to structural changes to the sport like reducing the team size and imposing a salary cap.
With less than 10 days to go to the Rio games here’s a downloadable calendar with all the cycling events in Rio for your diary. You’ll find road, track, MTB and BMX and this time with the specific time slots included.
The men’s road race is the opening event of the games and the winner on the Copacabana will be the first medallist of the 2016 Olympics.
Tinkoff are one of the sport’s galactic teams with several star riders. How much does it cost to run a team like this?
The team’s annual report and accounts were published online recently at the CVR, Denmark’s register of companies. Let’s take a closer look at the team’s budget, its ownership and operational structures and more.
Chris Froome rides the Stage 13 time trial in the Ardèche. In a race where he’d taken seconds on descents and in the crosswinds, it was the time trials were he put minutes into his rivals and Stage 13 put him out of reach of all his rivals. This was the moment the race was won.
The conclusion of the 2016 Tour de France. The final stage is part victory parade, part criterium as the Champs Elysées are reserved for the riders, a privilege only accorded to cyclists and visiting heads of state.
The final act and they’ve saved the best for last with an intense mountain stage that gets harder as it goes on with the Joux Plane and its toboggan-run descent into the finish as the climax to this year’s Tour de France. Once again it’s all live on TV from start to finish.